Spring-Ford Area School Board hoping to boost SAT scores to highest levels

ROYERSFORD — Members of the Spring-Ford Area School Board urged district administration to explore ways to increase the district’s SAT scores from their respectable number to the highest in the state.

“I know through the administration and the goals of the board that mediocrity will not stand,” said Joe Ciresi, the board’s vice president at Monday’s regular meeting. “We will do everything we can to move the pendulum as far as we possibly can.”

According to a presentation Superintendent David Goodin gave, the average score of the 431 Spring-Ford seniors was 1,542 on the 2,400 point test. Of those test-takers, 42 earned scores above 1900.

“As our district grows...there’s no reason why we can’t be in the 1900s to 2000 range with the majority of our students,” Ciresi said.

Figures obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of Education indicate that the average score of all SAT test-takers in the state was 1,407.

It is unclear whether the state’s figures include only seniors who took the tests or all students who took the tests. Under Spring-Ford’s entry, it appears that the state only used numbers taken from the seniors who took the SAT.

He said, in all grades, 665 students in the Spring-Ford Area School District students took 1,204 SAT tests in 2012. Some students obviously took the tests multiple times.

According to the Inquirer’s numbers, Spring-Ford ranked 77th of 652 in the state, Goodin said, and 39th out of the 87 schools in Bucks, Chester, Montgomery and Delaware Counties in average SAT scores.

Spring-Ford was more or less on par with other school districts in close proximity to it, ranking slightly behind Owen J. Roberts School District’s average score of 1,562 and slightly ahead of Phoenixville Area School District’s 1,535.

However, members of the school board wanted to explore what the next step was in improving Spring-Ford’s status in SATs.

Ciresi even envisions Spring-Ford cracking the top 10 on SAT score lists in the state, matching some districts he mentioned like Tredyfferin-Easttown and Lower Merion.

“We’ve started to take a look at some of the things we can do and they really fall into test-taking and time management strategies,” Goodin said. “(We want to) make sure the students understand the content and testing format. We’re going to be working on reducing testing anxiety and we’re also going to be focusing on practice testing.”

To make progress on those goals, Goodin said he, Assistant Superintendent Allyn Roche and High School Principal PAt Nugent are looking into creating a six-hour testing seminar for the students during one of their days of school.

Following the meeting, Goodin said the other seminars offering for SAT preparation are traditionally on Saturdays or outside the district. By doing the seminar “in-house” during a regularly schedule school day, Goodin believes more students will benefit.

Bernard Pettit, of the school board, said that it must be asked whether the students in the district are taking every test, not just the SAT, with the right strategies.

A seminar like the one suggested would presumably help that.

“Do we need to look at strategies as far as introducing different courses or enhancing different courses?” Board President Tom DiBello asked.

“I think if I could say anything right now about Spring-Ford is hat we are on the constant track of change,” Goodin said. “There’s no doubt that we’re putting new things in place in our curriculum committee. There’s a lot of areas that we’re moving and shaking.”

“When we look at the list of top districts and what they’re scoring, have we analyzed what they’re doing?” Ciresi asked. “Have we analyzed those districts themselves and what they’re doing curriculum-wise and what they’re doing internally?”

Goodin said that administration had not done such studies yet.

A strategy like looking at other districts’ programs or changing the district’s curricula might be geared more toward long-term implementation. Goodin characterized the seminar as a short-term kind of “triage” move.

Although he is obviously looking into improving scores, Goodin said he is not worried by the numbers.

“I think I would be more concerned if we were a district with no representation in the upper tiers,” he said.

Board member Edward Dressler said he’d like to see what the numbers mean in context with entry into colleges.

Using the average scores Spring-Ford students achieved in the three separate categories tested on College Board’s website, several respected, recognizable colleges matched the scores. Among the several hundred listed were area colleges like Bloomsburg University, Cabrini College, Eastern University and Penn State University’s main campus as well as some more exotic choices like Michigan State or Boise State Universities.

As a part of the meeting Monday night, Keystone Achievement Award display posters were presented to the principals of Brooke, Evans, Limerick, Oaks, Royersford and Upper Providence Elementary Schools, as well as the 5/6th, 7th, 8th and 9th Grade Centers.